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Sergeant Harry Fagel has seen things you can’t forget, like a ten-inch serrated Rambo-style knife plunged into a woman’s vagina and left inside to bleed her to death.

He’s seen the hookers, the homeless, all the things that we know go bump in the night on downtown streets and in hotel rooms, parked cars and suburban track homes. He’s been a Metro cop specializing in vice (prostitution), narcotics, robbery and homicide for 15 years and has lived in Vegas for 40 years, his whole life.

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"Vegas Part 7" by Harry Fagel

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"Jay-sahn's Deli" by Harry Fagel

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"Doo Doo" by Harry Fagel

He looks hardcore, hulking like a WWF wrestler with a shaved head, often packing guns under his off-duty t-shirt. He looks like he could kick your ass. But Harry is a poet, a lover of the arts and culture and Vegas, a family man with a powderpuff heart.

“People see a poet as this soft sensitive liberal writer that sits in a room somewhere and writes poetry, but that’s not what poetry is,” says Fagel. “Poetry is a visceral representation of passion and emotion and life. In the job that I do I see a lot of things that are burdening to the heart; they are heavy on the heart. Poetry is a way to help myself release those things for myself and help myself to understand the pain that we experience in this world.

I go back to the ancient times of the shogunate when they had these guys that worked for the shogun. They were warriors, but they also created poetry and created architecture and did things that balanced out the violent, visceral side of what they do.”

Fagel has published two book of poems, Street Talk and Undercover, free verse riddled with swear words and pungent with sex and drugs. In December he is releasing the CD Word Murder, a stab-you-in-the-heart combination of the spoken word and music of local rock band The Vermin with saxophonist of Tommy Marth of The Killers.